Bowdoin Beata

That's a song of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, my "dear alma mater," as that old hymn heralds. Beata, from the Latin beatus, or "blessed," defines Bowdoin architecturally, if not always socially.

I recently dreamed that I visited the Bowdoin campus at a Homecoming event and made the rounds of the old fraternities that had been converted to student houses, the Admissions Office, and other uses in the 1990s. In the dream each house sported an emblem or seal (not Greek letters) expressing their individual identities and pride of place. This decorative touch replaced each dwelling's Animal House reputation with a celebration of its new and proper role on campus: to house students with academic distinction. Which prompted me to reflect on the campus architecture to which I had paid little heed when I was there, being too caught up in the shenanigans of the frat scene to appreciate the beauty of the campus that lay before me all those four years.

MacMillan's majesty


MacMillan House, formerly Theta Delta Chi (TD), was the first house I visited in the dream – which was possibly a recollection of my two sole visits to its fraternity when I was in college. The first was during the annual "rush week," when incoming freshmen and others flocked to the beer parties the frats threw to bid and recruit new members. TD's prez told me, "Everyone here plays some kinda sport," "We have the highest grade-point average on campus," and "We bid people based mainly on their personality." I decided then and there that TD was not for me.

This was confirmed when I crashed a campus-wide party there a couple of years later. The smell of beer and the loud, confused brouhaha of jibber-jabber predominated the ambiance. "What's your name?" I asked someone. "None a'yuh business!" was the response. Good-bye forever. So you can imagine my dismay when, on my senior year's "Drop Night," from the porch of my frat I saw new members "dropping at" (joining) TD in droves (driven by a promo photo of TDers guzzling beer and whooping it up), while my frat got only two new members.

But now that it's no longer TD, I'll talk about what matters most about it: its architecture. Built in 1942 as a private fraternity house for Theta Delta Chi, it was renamed for famed Arctic explorer Donald B. MacMillan, when Bowdoin renamed each of its former frat houses after a distinguished alumnus or faculty advisor of each frat.

The house actually replaced an earlier one that had been built in 1904 as Theta Delta Chi's first chapter house on campus, designed by William R. Miller with a wraparound covered porch, steep gables, clustered windows, and picturesque pop-out bay windows, turrets, chimneys and other details. The brochure calling for its replacement called its brown Shingle Style "wrong" with "an absence of any collegiate feeling in its design." 

So it was replaced with a stately, traditionalist Georgian Revival design (above) by Felix Arnold Burton, Class of 1907, in keeping with the "early American" palette that characterized Bowdoin's architecture, according to that brochure. MacMillan House is confidently and coherently massed, as if it really means "business" in its housing of students. The left-side sunporch and right-side brick extensions give it a tempting lure of luxury – which might well have lured some of those new TDers on Drop Night, who knows?

Helmreich's House of the Seven Gables

Helmreich House, formerly Alpha Rho Upsilon (ARU), my fraternity, was renamed after the late Ernst Christian Helmreich, Reed Professor of History and Political Science Emeritus at Bowdoin, the club's original faculty advisor. (His sons were members of ARU.) I was tempted to join ARU based on the premise on which it was founded in 1946, "All Races United" (A.R.U.), so that Jewish and African-American students, and later women, could have a frat to belong to. It also had a reputation as an "anti-fraternity," having been originally founded in 1937 as the Thorndike Club, a dining club for non-fraternity "indies," under Ernst Helmreich's leadership as faculty advisor. 

ARU was far from anti-frat, as I painfully discovered in my four years there. And there were warning signs all along that joining it was my big mistake. Examples: My new ARU "Big Sister" immediately left school to get married. My best friend there suddenly transferred to the University of Chicago as soon as he got word that his girlfriend there was pregnant. By a margin of one vote, I was elected Orientation Chairman to plan activities for the new frosh members (including their "Hell Night" initiation), which put me behind in my studies. I had two unrequited crushes there. And so on. So I renounced ARU when I graduated, and it was the first of Bowdoin's remaining frats to close down in 1990, being in extreme arrears with the college.

But from the beginning I was intrigued by the house's architecture and history. It was built c.1900 by George Taylor Files, Professor of German, and his wife Edith Davis Files, who later established the George Taylor Files Professorship of Modern Languages at Bowdoin. The house is an unusual hybrid of Shingle Style and Georgian Revival. 

Those two styles were originally thought to be incompatible, the former having been a rebellion against the latter. But they work in agreeable balance here: the former supplies rustic shingles, a gambrel, and picturesque massing, while the latter graces it with a Palladian window within its gable, balustrades, a classical front porch with Ionic columns, some clapboard siding, and enough semi-symmetry to keep it in line with Bowdoin's "early American" architecture. 

The side sunporch – ARU's dining/party hall, all-nighter study space, "art exhibit" gallery, and milieu of its "Shot-a-Minute" tradition (no comment) – was added before 1952. Since then ARU sprouted several other additions that compromised its symmetry considerably.

These included an extension of its side gable over the sunporch that a frat president said "looks great" but served little useful purpose except to create an oversized studio apartment for a lucky member (or two, if it was a couple), and to add to the arrears that shut ARU down, initiating the phase-out of all Bowdoin fraternities. This evolution of Helmreich House truly transformed it into a "House of the Seven Gables" that at least now has the capacity to provide generous student housing.

More to come...